


I keep showing up, hell-bent on growing up

by mrs_laugh_track



Category: Pro Wrestling Guerrilla, Professional Wrestling
Genre: Gen, Kayfabe Compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-31
Updated: 2018-03-31
Packaged: 2019-04-16 03:28:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14155650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mrs_laugh_track/pseuds/mrs_laugh_track
Summary: After winning the PWG title Chuck goes to have a long overdue talk with an old friend. Or whatever it's called when it's with a person who doesn't talk very much, and also they're less of an old friend and more of a sometimes enemy whose orphanage you tried to keep from getting funded.





	I keep showing up, hell-bent on growing up

**Author's Note:**

> Above and beyond beta by noted above and beyond human Belmanoir
> 
> Title from If It Takes A Lifetime by Jason Isbell

It’s not far from Reseda to Mexico. Chuck is used to making much longer drives. This isn’t even the stupidest drive he’s ever made. It’s in the top five stupidest probably, but not the stupidest. 

He texts Trent. _I think you’re supposed to tell someone when you leave the country, so hey, I’m leaving the country_. There. Responsible. Him and Trent shared a room last night and Chuck snuck out like a weirdo this morning while Trent was still asleep. Canceled his flight. Scheduled another for the next day. It felt cool at the time. He’s champion, he can do what he wants. 

He’s the champion. 

He glances over at the passenger seat and there it is, there it really is, the PWG championship. Freshly pried of out Zack Sabre Jr.’s long freaky British hands. Actually, does Zack have long hands? He’s gotta to match his whole body, right? Oh ew, maybe he just has normal hands on those arms. That’d be weird right? He’s gotta pay more attention to Zack’s hands. Wait. Maybe not. 

Last night somewhere around Chuck’s third victory whiskey, the subject of Generico came up. Well, the subject of _can you believe how much everyone loves Chuck now, remember when he was getting booed out of the same building_ came up. And with that subject comes Generico. Apparently it’s very funny that Excalibur hasn’t heard anyone get near the amount of boos Zack gets for beating up Chuck since the boos Chuck himself got for beating up Generico. 

It’s not that funny. 

When Chuck asked if anyone had heard from Generico lately, a few people laughed. Someone said that actually they heard he was dead. Chuck declared that as PWG champion it was his duty to go make sure that the life or death status of all former champions was known. It was a just a pretty decent joke until he woke up this morning and realized that it wasn’t one.

He’s the _champion_. He shouldn’t have been able to beat Zack, not really. Heart. That’s what everyone’s been telling him since Zack made him pass out a year ago. That he’s got heart. He wants it to be true. After all, heart’s what champions have, and he really really likes being champion.

The plan honestly is to volunteer at the orphanage, at Generico’s orphanage, but saying so at the border still feels like a lie.

“Hello,” he says to himself alone in his car after successfully entering Mexico, “I’m Chuck Taylor and I’m here to volunteer at your orphanage.” Ridiculous. “Hi, my name is Chuckie and I used to make kids cry so much I put it on a shirt, please let me read to your children or paint your wall or something. I promise I won’t yell at anyone.” He has no idea what he’s doing, but hell, he’s doing it.

He has to turn around because he was so busy talking to himself he missed the instructions from the little voice on his phone. He probably shouldn’t be racking up these roaming charges. It’s the last thing he needs on top of everything. He’s not exactly sure what _everything_ is right now, but there’s a lot of it, okay? Probably he needs to not get lost in Mexico more than he needs to not have a completely brutal phone bill. It’s okay, he’s PWG champion. He can splurge a little. Especially when it’s on acting like such a good champion with so much heart.

Chuck gets there a little before noon, and it looks…normal. It’s a normal building. Which of course it is, what was he expecting, but if it weren’t for the sign that reads _Los Angelitos de El Generico_ he’d be sure he’s in the wrong place. 

He has no idea where to go, but there’s a woman leaning up against the front of the building with a clipboard. Middle-aged, kind of a mombabe. No mask or anything, but he figures she probably works here.

At first approach she looks pretty happy to see him, but probably she thinks he’s someone who has a good reason for being here. When he asks where he can find Generico, it doesn’t seem to be something she wants to hear. Maybe a lot of people come by trying to bug Generico. Or maybe everyone who works here actually hates Generico, that’d be a fun twist. 

Shit, oh no, maybe Generico really is dead.

Probably he should have just said he wanted to volunteer. There is no reason he has to talk to Generico directly. That’s the unselfish thing to do, right? As opposed to needing to show off what a good person he’s mostly attempting to be right in Generico’s face. Or would that just mean he was scared to face Generico? Is that why he’s thinking that? Fuck, this is going bad already. 

She asks him how he knows Generico. His first instinct is to lie, and his second instinct is to announce that he’s the guy who spent a good chunk of 2009 trying to keep the orphanage from being funded out of spite. Luckily he’s really buckled down on the whole impulse-control thing in the past few years and instead just says that they used to work together. Probably that was the best he was ever gonna do with his college Spanish anyway. Whatever. He speaks more Spanish then he ever heard El Generico speak. 

The woman looks him up and down in the way people always do when they hear you’re a wrestler. He tries to flex subtly. Apparently he seems plausible. She tells him that if Generico isn’t in his office he’s in the garden. 

In his _office_. Chuck is really hoping for the garden because the idea of Generico in an office is… He doesn’t even have a word for what that is. And he’s great at words. 

Chuck heads toward the door right as an empty school bus pulls up, and also right as a giant wave of children pour out of the door he’s heading towards. Okay probably it’s more like 12 kids, it’s not that big a place. Still. He feels extremely in danger and has to suppress a shriek. He looks helplessly back at the woman with the clipboard who is directing traffic. She shrugs. 

He finds Generico’s office pretty easily. His name isn’t on it, there’s just a cartoon of his mask on the door. Chuck is glad to see that he was worried about this place being normal for nothing. The office is empty, but it absolutely is an office that clearly belongs to El Generico. That is a room that exists in the world. El Generico’s office. Sure. There’s an ancient looking computer that Chuck is suspects may just be a prop. There’s a filing cabinet, and pencils in a shitty little homemade-looking ceramic cup. None of them look particularly used, but they’re there. Maybe the lady at the front was just fucking with him. Maybe Generico’s never in here. Chuck thinks about it and realizes he has no idea what Generico _does_ at the orphanage. 

The room is pretty covered in polaroids of him with kids, though. Playing soccer, hoisting them on his shoulders, getting cake smashed in his face, and other thrilling scenes right out of the “after” section of a commercial for antidepressants. _Now that I have my energy back I can do a bunch of cute annoying shit with my screaming brats! Thanks, modern medicine!_

He catches a brief glimpse out the window of a man holding a rope with a very determined-looking goat at the end of it. A man that looks suspiciously and impossibly like Kevin Steen. 

Chuck leaves the office and walks down the hall trying to find a garden of some kind. He can’t help but feel responsible for every cracked title or shitty light fixture. Which is stupid. Generico couldn’t really have ever funded this place off wrestling titles—certainly not off a PWG title. 

Okay, yes, Generico did apparently have to close the place down for about a year. Right around the time Chuck and Kenny were waging their own two-man war on Generico and his little angels. But he wasn’t responsible for these specific shitty tiles. Probably. Maybe he’ll ask if he can fix them. He doesn’t know how to do it, but he should maybe ask.

There are a few kids hanging around who didn’t go wherever the busses were off to. One of them throws a ball of paper at him. He feels slightly vindicated about the terribleness of children. Which okay sure, doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t take care of them, but it’s still a thing.

An anti-orphan-helping stance, Chuck has come to realize, is probably indefensible. He wishes that he could say he’s a different person now, but he’s not.

He still feels angry remembering when Generico started excitedly telling everyone about the orphanage. El Generico was already a better wrestler than everyone, and now suddenly he also had to be a better person than everyone too? Disgusting.

And the truth is, mostly he did what he did because he thought it was funny. He’s tried to find a better reason for it, but it keeps coming back to that. He thought it was funny and Kenny thought it was funny too. Sure, there’s a line between the idea of _hey it’d be funny if El Generico went on and on about his orphanage and then couldn’t even fund it_ and actually, deliberately, with stated intent, going after Generico to make sure that he couldn’t. It’s a pretty _fine_ line though. And it’s not like anything he did was that wrong. All he ever did was beat Generico at wrestling….okay and maybe bully him a little bit outside the ring. Or well, maybe bully him a lot. 

Empathy is a learned skill, he read that somewhere. Sure, it was about toddlers, but he’s gonna let himself, and maybe also Kenny, have this one. The Men of Low Moral Fiber have both grown up to be, if not men of high moral fiber, then at least… No, Kenny’s still a total fucking scumbag. There’s no getting around that. Chuck probably is too. But for the last year he’s been less of a scumbag than Zack and that can’t mean nothing. It can’t. 

Chuck finds the door to a little covered courtyard-type area with a vegetable garden in the middle of it, and in the middle of the garden, with about five kids, wearing an undershirt and some truly inexplicable floral-print shorts, is El Generico. 

He doesn’t know what to say to Generico. Honestly Chuck kind of wants to punch him—he forgot how goddamn punchable he looks all the time. He reaches deep to find the most sincere thing he can think of. “What can I do?” 

Generico beams at him like an old friend and throws him a pair of gardening gloves. He gestures at Chuck’s hair of all things and whistles. Oh yeah, the last time they saw each other would have been like 2013. Probably he had different hair? So, Chuck came on an incredibly dope, selfless, and extremely embarrassing mission of penance and the first thing Generico wants to tell him is that he thinks his haircut looks cute.

“Yeah, you look great too, uh, keeping that mask real clean, buddy.” 

Generico tagged with Chuck five months after getting an Awful Waffle through a table that stopped him from getting a shot at the tag titles. Chuck thinks about what it’d be like if someone made it their goal to stop him from getting a shot at his title. Trent wouldn’t do that, but he pictures him anyway. It doesn’t feel forgivable. But that didn’t matter, whatever terrible things he’d said about Generico’s beloved orphans didn’t matter. It’s stupid to try and feel like a good person by having El Generico approve of you, he doesn’t give a shit what kind of person anyone is. 

It’s hot, obviously. It’s Mexico in July and Chuck is out here pulling weeds by choice. Idiot. He doesn’t hate it. Generico comes and starts rubbing sunscreen on Chuck’s arms. Handsy weirdo. Maybe he doesn’t hate that either. Chuck wishes he had a better grasp on what exactly he hated, it’d make things a lot easier.

Something happens, Chuck doesn’t know what, but one minute everything’s cool and the next minute like three kids are crying. That’s the worst thing about kids. They just spew emotions everywhere all the time unpredictably. Jump at one and they’re as likely to laugh as they are to cry. It gives him the creeps. He watches Generico half crouch down to their height. The kids start to explain what happened. One of them is still just screaming. Chuck isn’t sure how old they are. Five? Seven? That shit is impossible to tell. 

After whatever is going on is done—well, Chuck guesses it’s done, one of the kids is still crying but Generico seems to think it’s done—Generico, glowing with fondness, turns to Chuck and shakes his head a little. Chuck nods back like _ha ha yeah, kids, what are you gonna do_. 

After a couple hours of dirt stuff, Chuck and Generico sit on a little step drinking water and eating shockingly good sandwiches. There’s a lot of things Chuck should say probably. He’s not sure what they are exactly, but there’s gotta be a lot of them. There’s just one thing he needs to get out of the way first or he is not going to be able to focus.

“I thought, this is definitely fucking stupid, but I thought I saw Kevin here earlier? With a goat?”

El Generico glares. “Sí. The goat.” He says it with such pure disgust. Chuck can see it now, the goat nipping at Generico’s coat in the winter, them engaging in some kind of ridiculous tug of war with a rope. Oh, the hijinks Generico and this goat must have. Of course.

“Okay, you can take me through your thing with the goat later, I, for real, am fully invested in this situation. But hey, did I see Kevin or what?”

Generico nods.

“Isn’t he on tour right now or something?”

At this Generico pauses like maybe he’s not gonna tell him, maybe they’re just gonna talk about the goat. He looks at Chuck for what feels like a long time. Chuck hates tests, but apparently he passes.

Generico presses his palms together and then slowly pulls them apart. Like something opening or peeling or unzipping maybe. Then spreads his arms wide, the hands traveling out in opposite directions. 

Chuck wishes Generico wasn’t raised by butterflies or whatever dumb thing makes him think this is a better way to communicate than talking. Probably he wasn’t raised by butterflies. Don’t butterflies only live like six months or some shit like that? That’d be pretty sad. But the issue here isn’t the hypothetical number of butterfly funerals feral child El Generico had to witness. He knows it’s about Kevin and being in two places at once. He’s not stupid, he gets it, he just doesn’t actually get it.

“Oh okay, thanks, that really clears up absolutely nothing.”

Generico heaves the world’s most long-suffering sigh, shakes his hands out, and starts to tell the story.

Generico takes both hands and uses them together to create a little walking man. He then rubs them together and makes a slightly disquieting whooshing noise and pulls them apart. Each hand is then its own identical walking man. 

“So you’re saying that Kevin… split in half? There’s two Kevins now.” 

Generico is so happy he leaps to his feet and gives a little twirl.

Chuck remembers Kevin’s last PWG show. Him and Trent had just won a match, then got to watch Kevin get rolled up by a thick-legged hillbilly kid. 

Chuck remembers all of the promises Kevin made that night. That he was going to go move down to Mexico and bring his family and get a hundred animals. That he was going to go be with Generico. That Generico had called him and said “Kevin. Help? Sí?” and that had been it. “After everything he did for me,” Kevin said. 

Trent leaned over and asked, “Bullshit or no?”

Chuck was pretty sure it was bullshit, but what he said was “I think he’s really gonna do it man. Look, he’s all crying and shit.” 

Trent grinned his major-dumb-guy grin at that. “Cool.” 

Of course Kevin didn’t really do it. People don’t really do things like that. People, real people, take TV contracts and don’t look back.

But apparently people can be in two places at once. Parts of them at least. Hell, apparently whole families can. Kevin did everything he promised and somehow got Wrestlemania too. So what does Chuck know about the kinds of things people do?

“Hey uh, you know magic’s not real right?”

Generico starts to lift a mimed grenade and Chuck flinches back. He puts it down without pulling the pin.

“Okay, fair enough.” 

They sit quietly for a while. 

“Does Kevin, the other Kevin, the one on TV. Does he know about all this? That he’s also here?” 

Generico shakes his head.

“Does he remember you?” _Does he miss you_ , Chuck doesn’t ask.

Generico doesn’t respond. Oh shit, did he make Generico sad? That’s not why he came here. 

Generico pulls himself together, straightens up his shoulders and tilts his hand side to side. _Kind of. More or less. Sometimes. Maybe._

“That’s pretty fucked up, dude.”

Generico shrugs. It is what it is.

Before Chuck can come at Generico with some real hard-hitting journalism about this situation, Kevin is standing there in front of him.

There he is, Kevin Steen. Or half of Kevin Steen? Whatever percentage or whatever of Kevin this is looks relaxed and happy. He grins at Chuck, holds out a hand to shake, and then spits in Chuck’s face the second Chuck accepts. 

Generico barely even tries to contain his laughter. They’re unpleasant when they’re fighting, but they’re insufferable when they’re happy. Chuck flips them both off. 

Kevin goes over some shit about whatever, farm animal stuff. Chuck can basically relate. He had a horse once. It is however extremely boring. Though if you looked at either of them you’d think they were talking about… Diamonds? Paris? Whatever people in love get real excited about.

Kevin pulls back like he’s gonna hit Chuck, but just ruffles his hair instead and wanders off. Asshole.

Chuck drinks his water which, despite his best attempts to tap into whatever magic energy might be floating around, has not, in fact, turned into beer. 

Chuck has a great idea. “So where do you keep your ring around here? Let’s put on a fantastic once-in-a-lifetime exhibition. A celebration for the children! You, me, Kevin and whatever local lucha boys you can round up on short notice.”

“No ring.” Generico shakes his head. 

Wow. What kind of shitty orphanage doesn’t even have a wrestling ring?

“Really? You gotta get one on-site man. Get a kickstarter. Okay, where’s the closest one?”

Generico shrugs like he doesn’t even care. 

How can he not care? Maybe it’s because... Generico split too right? His brain feels not good when he tries to think about both of them at the same time, like sudden-onset-Wrestlemania-weekend-hangover not good, but he pictures Sami Zayn. That’s… A lot. A lot happened there. It couldn’t have been easy.

Chuck holds his hands together. He doesn’t gently peel them apart the way Generico did earlier when he was demonstrating about Kevin, he rips them apart fast and sharp.

“Sí,” Generico says and pats his hand over his heart. It freaks Chuck out more than a little, but Generico is smiling.

It seems like it’s better to Generico that at least some of him is out there getting after it, but Chuck doesn’t really understand how it’s not worse. Chuck doesn’t even like to watch his own matches that he actually experienced being in. The idea of watching himself and not even knowing what mistake he’s about to make, oof.

Maybe Generico doesn’t watch. He’s pretty busy. 

More kids have come out into the garden. At some point the bus must have gotten back. Chuck ends up kicking a ball around with the bigger ones for a while. Generico rolls his eyes with his whole body whenever Chuck starts to play too hard. Sorry, but he’s not gonna just let a bunch of kids win, come on.

The sun is just starting to get low in the sky, Chuck pulls Generico aside. “Hey,” he says. “I’m heading out. I just, I wanna say I’m sorry I guess. For you know… Whatever. All of it. I’m sorry. And if you ever need…..” Chuck can’t think of a single thing Generico could possibly need from him. He pats Generico on the chest. “El Generico numero uno, okay?” 

Generico beams. “Sí! Numero uno!” He half stumbles half leaps at Chuck, gives him a kiss on the forehead and a big thumbs up, then dashes off to stop Kevin’s goat from chewing on a scarecrow. 

“Oh, okay. Thanks man?” 

Kevin and Generico gave up so much to stay here. Chuck tries to imagine what that would be like, leaving part of himself here. Doing hard work, sitting in the sun, feeling real good about himself probably. There’s something tempting about the idea. But the truth is, this place kind of sucks, magic is dumb, and he worked too hard for too long to even get a shot at the PWG title to not defend it with every possible part of himself.

He rubs his forehead where Generico kissed him and checks his phone. Lots of texts. People want to talk to the champion. It looks like Ricochet wrote him a whole novel. There’s four texts from Trent. 

_What country?_  
_Mexico?_  
_Hey good job again on winning the big one._

And the fourth one is a picture of a drawing of two blobby aliens in a palm tree with their hogs out. It’s done on what looks like a boarding pass. 

Chuck starts his drive back to California, glad Trent didn’t miss his flight.

**Author's Note:**

> Hello. Three months ago I thought, wouldn't it be funny if known CHIKARA boy Chuck Taylor said magic was fake and here we are.


End file.
